Destiny Kinal's Blog

Sic Transit Gloria: a eulogy for Peter Berg, the father of bioregionalism

2011-09-11T09:15:00.000-07:00

Sic transit gloria: And so passes one of the most intriguing, profoundly influential men I have met in my life.

I first met Peter Berg in the spring of 1967 at the Digger's Free Store in the Haight Ashbury District of San Francisco, where radical politics met the counterculture.

My daughter Gilian and I lived on the Panhandle on Oak. I was 24. I waited table nights at the Committee, a comedy club in North Beach. Days, I worked as an entry-level garmento at Alvin Duskin, which made mod-inspired dresses at affordable prices. Our working group was planning a free city event and I was assigned to line up some free bands. Those were the days when everyone knew everyone in San Francisco, at one or two degrees of separation at most.

Gilian immediately found Judy's son Aaron in the store, both of them three years old, soft raven feather hair, pale skin, rosy cheeks, blue eyes and high energy. They began tearing up and down the aisles while Judy, who was folding clothes on the far side of the store, called to Peter on the opposite side. When I walked over, Peter jackknifed out of a curtained cupboard bed. Compact, quick on his feet, and concentrated, like sprung steel, Peter had a wry piercing gaze. While his every move and word was theatrical, it came from within him, to punctuate and call attention to what was occurring. Peter was faintly reptilian (like a raptor is also reptilian) without being repulsive. In fact, I found Peter highly attractive because of the caliber of thoughts and impulses that emanated from him like a natural pulse That day, in the Free Store, when I quickly explained what we were doing, he put me on the pay phone on the wall with Danny Rifkin, manager of the Grateful Dead, who assured me they would be there for us.

I like remembering that I started by asking Peter Berg for a favor, which he quickly made happen. (Later the tables would be turned and I would be asking others to fund our ideas: a fishing boat, a trip to Mongolia, Punch and Judy puppet theater workshops.)

A week later, on my way to a North Beach meeting of our Free City group, having accepted a ride on a motorcycle, I smashed my right thigh and spent in the Summer of Love in traction above Golden Gate Park at the UC Med Center on Sutro Hill.

I didn't see Peter and Judy again for a year, but the thing they were helping broadcast made their way from the Haight Ashbury and the Park into my hospital room effortlessly. You've doubtless heard it said: we were all Diggers. I was one of those denizens of the scene happy to have the inner cadre plan the events, publish the Oracle, put out broadsides that reflected our views, open a free job Bank, free Clinic…in short, I trusted them absolutely to represent me. That cadre--the Free Family--never betrayed that trust.

Later that summer, I moved into a house with good friends Fay Blake and Phil Davis, radical steelworker. Frank Cieciorka, the artist, Vinne Rinaldi, Murry Korngold were all part of this circle of Diggers. From my window, supported by my crutches, I watched Phyllis Willner and the other wild Free Family girls head off for New Mexico in the back of a pickup truck. I went back to work at Alvin Duskin's and moved to North Beach, part of a Jules and Jim ménage-a-trois.

In the intervening year, I shared glasses of wine at Enrico's with poets and writers in North Beach, while going to work every morning. When it got too hard, I gave everything away and moved into a tepee in Big Sur for the winter. After my first Passover at the Sun Gallery, in south Big Sur, I headed east to my family's property in western New York, where we were magnets for all the countercultural energy that was building there. In the fall, I moved to Santa Fe where I took my place as a member of our East Indian band: sitar, sarod, and tabla. I played tamboura.

And then the Diggers sent out a call: Would everyone come back to the Haight to make a stand? We did.

During the terrible winter of 68-69 Haight Ashbury became an insane asylum without walls. The street became a gaunlet of hustlers, groups took up resident in our basement, our front room. Motorcyclists killed a young woman in her home down the street.

Peter Berg remembered picking me and Gilian up, taking us to Treat Street for the women there to feed and comfort. I don't recall that incident at all but I believed Peter years later when he told me about it. Things were so bad--think Paris as the Nazis marched on it--I called Gilian's father and got her a plane ticket to safety. As the winter tapered into spring, Psychedelic Rangers made the rounds of houses where individuals in catatonic states of fear were coaxed back with simple therapies. My Ranger non-verbally explained the golden mean to me with a painting and a piece of string for measuring. He squeezed out fingerpaints and had me draw the sacred Sanskrit letter aum. Someone gave me a small bag of medicine, acid chips in a baggie--"Just one at a time"--to give me the courage to go out and see the world again.

Then a town meeting was called to brainstorm what might be next. I remember--or think I remember--a vision being articulated of taking to the road, visiting the far-flung communes who had established beachheads of experimental countercultural lifestyle.

I stood up with my own vision, recalling being a child in England, how the interiors of blocks in London were often open parklands for the community of the block to enjoy: vegetable gardens, allees of large trees, fountains and playgrounds. After, in a article in the Berkeley Barb, I was credited with inspiring People's Park but what I recall is leafleting our block, standing the window with Vinnie Rinaldi, crowbars and tools in hands, trying to get up the nerve to take down the first fence with it was perfectly obvious that removing even one fence would have us all behind bars by nightfall.

In the spring of 1969, I married into the Free Family and Peter and Judy became daily intimates. So how to squeeze out the essence of that intimacy that lasted more than forty years?

Peter had an uncanny ability to make things burgeon in me. Judy and Peter named their truck the Albigenisien Ambulance, and spread stories of the Albigensians or Cathars, heretic perfecti from South of France in the middle ages who died to the last man, woman and child rather than renounce their values and their community. This story set deep roots in me: my novel Burning Silk, published last year and one of three winners of the Ben Franklin First Book awards, reached back into that deep history of the Huguenots and their Cathar/ Albigensian forebearers.

In fact, Peter awoke my love of history, such a crucial part of who I am, what shapes my time, that I can only observe wonderingly that I once loathed history for its focus on dates and treaties.

How many of us heard the story of the Duc Abors from Peter, those Slavic folk in the plains of Canada who, every few years, would burn their homes and move on, the ultimate spiritual potlatch for an incurably nomadic people?

Many have spoken of Peter's immense contribution to this period of time we inhabit, in reawakening us to our ancient relationship with our watershed. Together with Raymond Dasman, Freeman House, David Simpson, Gary Snyder and others an entirely new field of study was born. I call this the First Wave of bioregionalism. In the acknowledgements section of my novel, I credit Peter and Judy, Freeman and David for "incubating and fostering bioregionalism, one of the most germane ideas of my lifetime and of this book." In what I call the Second Wave of Bioregionalism, tens of thousands of small watershed organization were born out of this understanding, fostering and restoring not only local rivers, lakes and creeks but also the people and their culture, a continuous adjustment, revitalization and engagement Peter named "reinhabitation."

For me, Peter was also a memory bank. Key moments, etched with chiseled clarity, featured Peter, avuncular, leaning in close to me like a kindly raptor, with a message for me and me alone that would begin with "Let me show you something," or "Have you ever heard of…" or "We all try to be perfect. But.." or "I remember one Halloween in the Rockies when you…"

Of course Peter the actor was another caliber of being, his sense of nonverbal humor animating his face, hands, posture. I missed the years of Reinhabitory Theater from the mid-70's to the early 80's, as I headed east, home to my biological family. But I only needed to see black and white still photos of Peter in the role of Lizard to have the entire hilarious reel roll before my interior eye.

When I started the Reinhabitory Institute a couple years ago, an homage to Peter's vision, I told Peter and Judy that part of the mission of the organization would be to see the Third Wave of Bioregionalism ushered in, when every household, every neighborhood, every school would not only understand but practice the principles of bioregionalism…even though they might not call it by that name. In the critical first year of our start-up, both Peter and Judy were immensely supportive. In the small community on the Susquehanna River where I have practiced community organizing for the past 26 years, when I say the word Reinhabitory Institute, everyone nods. The term is self explanatory, crossing political and class boundaries. Thus, Peter's legacy keeps on expanding, his gift to humanity, to understand how to fit into the web of life.

Peter's wit was stiletto. We recognized the same gene pool in each other and understood behaviors that, to others, often seemed cold and even cruel.

Once when I called after an absence of a couple years, Peter said, "Is this Destiny the good witch or Destiny the bad witch?" I might well have turned the question around.

And yet know this: even when being ruthless and direct, Peter Berg was always moving in service to the truth and the light.

Peter's work was this: to give context to my work as a community organizer. Whether dumpster diving, behind the scrim of a Punch and Judy Puppet show, organizing participants to enroll in a dance, theater or yoga workshop, developing a community garden, working underground in the food and beverage industry, confronting the current history of a Valley on the Susquehanna with half of the population living in poverty, Peter's conceptual frameworks were steadying ballast, context in a raging sea of anomie, in a compassless culture.

Peter and Judy connected a vast web of likeminded people. I have never been to Gary Snyder's KitKitDizze but Peter and Judy brought us a piece of the herb to smell, the keystone herb that makes Gary's home unique. On the way to my husband Chuck Gould's and my house in Conundrum Creek outside of Aspen, lay Rolling Thunder and Spotted Fawn's house in Nevada who sent gifts and stories. We dropped south with the truck convoy to Dome City on the New Mexico/Colorado border and saw the advances those people were making in passive solar and geodesic domes, brought our sargis berry preserves.

Years later and years ago, I tasted my first acorn muffin that Judy had made. Heard about the independence struggle of Fourth Nations--Lapps, Galicians, Basques, Australian aborigines--from Peter, and considered, with him, a participatory democracy dilemma: how to devalue or neutralize the educated British accent making a point in open parliament against the person from an oral tradition, speaking English poorly, if at all.

That cadre--the Free Family-- betrayed that trust in only one essential way: the tribe was modeled--perhaps unconsciously--on the patrilineal rather than the matrilineal, and that made all the difference. We were zero-base modeling a new culture but--out of ignorance--we didn't pull out that noxious root. But time, the great healer, has brought parity and equity between the genders, leaving the Sixties experience of women being silenced a final harsh lesson from the annals of patriarchy. Finally, in many contexts, women have taken their place running things, while men represent our mutually arrived at decisions to the world. Sons and daughters hope that we can go forward with both men and women running things and representing our decision to the world. We shall see. Now that we have taken our voices back, and moved into our natural spheres of power, I can see us move from gender parity to full equality. With time, however, I have seen how much gender differences serve us in finding our roles.

Susquehanna flood, community organizing--underwater in East Sayre

2011-09-10T10:24:00.000-07:00

photo: yournewsnow

My partner in Reinhabitory Institute, Judith Thomas, was visiting the Penn-York Valley from the San Francisco Bay Area. I had told her my valley was a bioregionalist’s dream: in two states and three counties, between the Susquehanna and the Chemung Rivers. this community refers to itself as “The Valley,” and has a culture everyone who lives here understands. Judith was visiting here for a handful of days to let me take her on a tour to help her understand this community where I have been organizing for the past 26 years. Our organization is in the earliest stages of starting Project GROW! to involve young people from both sides of the border to learn how to grow and process food, an art form that was widely practiced in East Sayre and throughout the Valley until just a decade ago.

We visited the Ukrainian Community Center in East Sayre on the last day of August. Judith agreed with me: the center is an ideal place to organize from. Our infant Project GROW!- for disaffected and unemployed young people not going to college–could have its first garden right in the backyard of the vacant lot that comes with the building. We’d call it The Grange Hall and share offices there with other 501c3′s working in the community like Carantouan Greenway, the river organization I founded 16 years ago.

We’d invite collaborators when we had a better grip on how to get control of the building and purchase it with the State’s help. “These deals can take years to put together,” I had told Dan Polinski, representing the Ukrainian church community in the sale of the building. “We’ll all have to be patient.”

Dance floor and stage on the first floor, dining room and kitchen on the ground floor, the center had allowed us, Carantouan Greenway, to host several successful spaghetti suppers there. We’d featured the gardens of East Sayre on our annual Garden Tours where men of Italian and Ukrainian descent raised vegetables in the rich soil at the foot of the levees, in their backyards, canning for big extended families.

I’d had my eye on the community center for a decade. When it came on the market recently, I began laying plans to acquire it for the community. The bricks-and-mortar project was admittedly down the scale of priorities behind, 1) getting at least one garden on the ground by summer 2012 and securing funding to put kids to work in it during the growing and harvest season, with paid jobs. Training a new generation of leaders was slated for the winter of 2011-2012, to take over from aging shrinking boards and pick up fresh ideas for the Valley and run with them. The dozens of people I had interviewed mentioning this piece of our plans will smile reading this. I was candid with them; that community center was a perfect place, in the old ethnic neighborhood of East Sayre with its gardening tradition, right next to the river. We’d reinaugurate the summer festivals that spilled out onto the side lawn: Christmas tree lights, tables, beer garden, music.

Judith and I toured the center with Dan Polinkski’s back up the last day of August. We stopped down to meet with Tim Phinney then, Sayre’s genius at packaging public private deals, who opening his calendar on his desk at the Enterprise Center suggested we see it Thursday morning 9/8, after Labor Day weekend.

A long Labor Day weekend passed. In the Valley, it started to rain and was still raining on Monday. Reports of flooded bridges and section of I-86 closing started to circulate.

I got a call from Tim Phinney early Thursday morning. The rivers and creeks were cresting; he had to watch the Enterprise Center to make sure it didn’t “spring a leak.”

If we had kept that appointment Thursday morning, we would have seen the dramatic change residents of East Sayre report.

Jerry Pryslopski told me on the phone that he was at his aunt’s at 10:15 am on Thursday.
The basement and yard had taken some water. But even during Agnes his family’s basement only took water to mid-calf. He called his cousin, asking whether he should come down with a van to move some furniture out. She said she wasn’t worried. The levees weren’t breached during Agnes in 76. By noon, an hour and a half later, the cousin and Jerry’s mother had water past the first floor windows.

A women reported opening her back door and finding the river, right there in her yard.

On Friday morning, the Covey’s–mom, dad and daughter–looked down the street at their house, covered–along with other neighbors’–with water that had fallen four feet back to the first floor windows after the crest. Coveys said they had been berating themselves yesterday, Thursday, for not taking boxes up off the basement floor. By late afternoon, the water was in their second floor, giving new meaning to a “house gone underwater.” (This term has been used exclusively to describe a house that is worth less than the mortgaged amount.) This is not the case with most of the houses in East Sayre, which were purchased in many cases after the turn of the century, and inherited by their current inhabitants.

Sitting on their front porch, in a part of the neighborhood that’s dry, looked across the street at the community center and said that it would be perfect if the center were opened to the community. Neighbors could meet there, both those who houses are drowned and those dry, have a cup of coffee, commiserate. Perhaps a cook out. A town meeting. Social services could be organized out of there, rebuilding efforts. Having access to the center would give Tim Phinney, Dan Polinski, and Jim Daly, part of Sayre’s Emergency Management team, a place to sit with residents to collect information.

I said that Reinhabitory Institute is ready to open the community center with coffee, tea, pie, chairs and tables, as soon as an agreement can be reached for its use.

It seems a perfect metaphor for our times: those of us in some parts of the Valley are high and dry while in the Cannonhole, downtown Athens and East Sayre, it’s New Orleans all over again.

Mid-morning I arrived and parked. I had tried to walk down River Road toward Tioga and Orchard. I stood gaping. Half the north side of the neighborhood lay partially beneath the water.

A young girl in rubber boots stood at the edge grimly looking. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” I said. “Neither have I,” she replied. As I rejoined the group back at the intersection, I realized she was the Covey’s daughter; she was looking at her sunken and foundering house.

Covey’s partner of 30 years told me, “They told us we didn’t need flood insurance. No one in this neighborhood had it.” I told her that my family in California couldn’t buy earthquake insurance either; you couldn’t afford it. “Why didn’t they use sand bags?” Covey quietly asked Pierce, a multigenerational resident of East Sayre, a young man working in his neighborhood in waders. Pierce shrugged. It had happened so fast.

Perhaps everyone was in denial.

Within an hour and a half, or twelve hours, or twenty four–whichever timetable had residents of East Sayre start their personal countdown–the river poured over the levee, claimed all the sweet apple orchards bearing fruit ready to pick, washed out the gardens getting one more day of ripening before canning tomatoes in earnest, moved decks and sheds a city block, and peeked into the attic windows.

“It going to be years,” said Covey’s partner, who had grown up in the neighborhood. “Years.”

My reading & discussion of Burning Silk at Riverrow bookstore in Owego on January 15

2011-01-20T09:38:00.000-08:00

A reading of Burning Silk by Destiny Kinal at Riverrow Bookshop in Owego Sunday January 15th, 2011 morphed into a discussion of the Persephone myth, a natural midwinter theme dealing with the maladies of SADD, depression, and loss of community.

The discussion ranged further into the coming hard times that many are anticipating, not only from the economic downturn, but also from the collapse of our environment as global climate change proceeds: how do we prepare for these changes?

Participants pointed out that hard times are already afflicting those at the bottom of the economy, those who have depended on the underground economy to survive. Two individuals volunteered that they had just lost their jobs because their companies moved to China, a job one of them had held for 16 years.

Persephone, the story goes, the daughter of Mother Earth or Ceres, was abducted and dragged into the underworld by Pluto. The world went into an endless winter as Ceres mourned. The animals sent a delegation to Pluto to negotiate for Persephone's return. A deal was struck: Persephone could return to the surface of Earth if she ate nothing for an entire year during her stay in the underworld.

At the end of the year, Persephone ate three pomegranate seeds. Thus, a new deal had to be made: Persephone returns to the surface in the spring and summer while in the fall and winter, she remains in the underworld. In this way, not only were the season explained by our ancient forebearers but also death and the consequences of our mortality.

Medicine man of the Lenape Big Horn Band, David Chamberlain, told a myth from his people of horned serpents who live in the underworld, whose ill effects are released when the earth is pierced too deeply. A similar story of an abduction of a human girl by the horned serpents is told by the Lenape as well. Chamberlain, known as Hitakonanulaxk in Lenape, is the author of The Grandfathers Speak: Tales of the Lenape People. The book is available at SRAC on Broad Street in Waverly.

John Doscher of Lockwood, NY, and author of a body of work studying the possibilities of a sustainable society, read three poems on the subject of loss and transformation.

Michael Sean O'Dwyer (Kane) of Waverly and Addison NY read from his recently released book, A Voice in the Wilderness, on his hike from Florida to Canada on the Appalachian Trail, during which time he naturally reflected on the state of the world. O'Dwyer/Kane read passages describing that winter of the soul we call despair as well as thoughts on organizing and strengthening community locally.

The group seemed to agree that the biggest challenge we face now is the disintegration of community, so necessary to organizing to meet hard times prepared. The theme of knowing how to grow your own food and preserve it came up repeatedly.

Destiny Kinal spoke about the metaphor of metamorphosis from a worm to a winged thing, that lies at the heart of Burning Silk, her novel about the alliance between French Huguenot silkmakers and their native American neighbors in southern Pennsylvania in the 1830's.

Burning Silk, the first novel in the Textile Trilogy, will be followed in 2012-13 by Linen Shroud, which--continuing the story of the Duladier and Montour families in their march toward modernity--takes place during the US Civil War.

Riverrow Bookshop, which is run by John Spencer, one of Owego's community development entrepreneurs, together with his daughter Laura, features an entire section at the front on regional authors. The basement of the bookstore, organized by subject and genre, is a treasure trove for book collectors.

The organizers of the reading will be meeting to decide whether the Persephone midwinter reading should be an annual event, open to regional writers to read from their work on these themes: the psychological trips to the underworld that afflict us humans at this time of year and the prospect of coming hard times. How can we prepare ourselves for a possible collapse that many scientists and social prognosticators are predicting?

Call Destiny Kinal at 510-701-8909 or 607-565-8475 or contact the Reinhabitory Institute online at info@sitiotiempopress.com if you would like to comment on the event and continue the discussion on the importance of community in weathering hard times.

The Big Daddy of all the Book Fairs: Frankfurter Buchmesse

2010-10-27T18:13:00.000-07:00

As a spanking new press with one publication--Burning Silk, my first novel in the Textile Trilogy--and another in the pipeline, going to Europe to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair would have been a case of the intent of our grasp exceeding our reach.

The Set-Up
But since I was already going to be in Europe as a presenter at an academic colloquium on The Woodstock Years, 1965-75 at Le Havre University, and had exchanged my home in Berkeley for ten days in a canal house in Amsterdam to work on and research my second book, Linen Shroud, we decided to attend the Frankfurter Buch Messe, where the greatest cost was the hotel room (178 euros/night for a hostel.)

Scale
Reportedly 20K book professionals participate in what is styled as the world's biggest book fair. Does this include the 10K members of the press? It certainly doesn't include the public whose number reportedly swell into six figures.

Gratefully, Not Everyone Speaks English Yet…

And if they do, they often prefer to converse in their own language. My former neighbor and friend in Berkeley Inke Schwab, who had returned to her native Germany four years earlier, responded to my offer of a shared adventure. Inke, being trilingual, proved to be an immense asset in negotiating the complexities of the fair, a challenge not only linguistic but also deeply cultural.

Proximity to the Past
On Monday and Tuesday, we drove up into the hills 100 kilometers beyond Frankfurt into the Vogelsberg--as dotted with windmills as a Miyazaki fantasy film--where my relations through my immigrant great grandmother still live in our ancestral village. In Rebgeshain, perhaps three hundred households, people are most likely to marry someone from the village or from the next village. (This observation gives rise to the aphorism: Die besten stecken findet man in der hahesten hecken [sic] which translates loosely: If you're looking for a walking stick, find it in your own hedge.) This accounts for the remarkable fact, as my German friends tell me, that my first letter addressed to this family ten years ago, bore on the envelope only a century old photo of the original house, the family name Ruppel and the village name. It had arrived safely to tell of my impending visit.

In the intervening decade, our family genealogist Bill Sackinger from Alaska, fluent in German, had visited annually to cement relations and comb through church records. This would be my second visit, announced long distance by a German friend who referred to me as the "instigator." I carried a secret weapon this time: Inke Schwab.

Too Big?
We had been advised, through those in the know, that FBM has grown beyond professional enjoyment. Many of those who we had been referred to--fellow publishing professionals in Europe--no longer attend FBM because it has grown too large and impersonal. Buch Messe functions through appointments made months in advance. Inke and I decided that we would attend Wednesday and Thursday, the most intimate days in the opinion of those in the know, to check it out and figure out how it works.

Scaling
The scale of the Buch Messe coference center is roughly analogous to the square footage of the terminals of SF airport or Boston Logan (eliminating roads and runways, drawing the buildings into a more compact oval.)

We spent all of Wednesday puzzling out the complex layout--eight buildings, each with three-four floors--as well as the functions and locations of both events and exhibitors. We attended an excellent seminar on buying and selling foreign rights (30 euros each.) We trekked the vast hallways, locating specific presses in the French, German and English speaking worlds.

The English Language Publishing World
Independent Book Publishers Association (ibpa) were there representing our novel Burning Silk as well as perhaps 75-100 other books in every genre. The distributor Ingram had a large airy booth. We stopped by Verso, the British radical publisher of Tariq Ali, the New Left Review, as well as scholarly leftist texts.

Do we mention names when the science of name dropping is raised to such a high art at an event like this one? Our marketing staff back home in Berkeley urge me to fight against my reticence: MFA friend George Michelsen Foy had his nonfiction Zero Decibels (www.georgefoy.com) published by Scribner/Simon & Schuster. Surely I would be able to report back to him that his book had been prominently displayed among the others on the chair rail lining the large booth? Seeing his book nowhere in evidence, I combed through the catalog of Spring and Fall releases 2010: not a mention. I picked up a blue low budget publication titled: Subsidiary Rights Guide. Nada. Perhaps George's fine exploration, subtitled The Quest for Absolute Silence, as slim and rich as a Malcolm Gladwell best seller, needed to prove its worthiness to be published in another language by selling more copies in its first English edition? With time, I prayed, and moved on.

In addition to a sales track, which decisive factors in this winnowing process determined which books would be featured for foreign rights? Surely a book that had just been released this summer would not have a sales record to speak of by October, would it?

Wouldn't the interests of a given foreign market's readership come into play? Mizzi van der Pluijm of Amsterdam's Contact and a leading player on this stage according to the New York Times had written an article analyzing reader preferences by country. I was surprised to find that not only do the Dutch not read memoir, they scorn it. Back in the land of "j'adore" and "je deteste," Barbara Chase- Riboud of Sally Hemings and Venus Hottentot fame told me that the French adore historical fiction. Chase-Riboud assured me that Burning Silk would find a French publisher.

France, Germany, Holland
We quickly understood that the impressive booths of say, a Gallimard, with intimate tables and chairs for appointments, were largely selling foreign rights for books they publish. We dropped off a copy of Burning Silk and the bound bilingual translation of the first chapter in French for Gallimard's director of foreign rights, a contact given me by a scout I had met a decade earlier in Montolieu, France's book village where I had lead a collaboration of writers, artists, and printers to produce a limited edition book Entre Deux Rivieres. We were told that all the buyers were out on the floor, only sellers were in the booth. (Okay, I've reached the limit of my namedropping ability; I cannot cross the threshold of naming either the Gallimard director nor the scout in the Languedoc, handlers be damned.)

We picked up a glossy Fiction France that featured excerpts from a number of contemporary French novelists including Agnes Desarthe's Dans La Nuit Brune (http://www.paris-expat.com/interviews/5-08chez.htm) and Jean Mattern's De Lait et De Miel. (www.frenchpubagency.com/Author-1079181/Jean-Mattern.html)

By the end of the first day, it dawned on both of us that the key to selling foreign rights lay in having an agent to cover each country.

Getting our Books through Customs
Our books, shipped both from the US and from Amsterdam weeks earlier, had not arrived. A letter to our hotel on Wednesday informed us that our bilingual translation of the first chapter of Burning Silk, neatly bound with the book's cover art, was being held at customs. First thing Thursday morning, we retrieved them. Without Inke's taking the lead while applying the curb to my tongue, I would have had to pick a fight with these most insufferable of the bureaucrat caste. However, upon the multiple pounding of the official stamp on the last triplicate, we headed for the entry gate of the Buch Messe, our badge firmly established in the carryon suitcase we towed.

Agents Sequestered
Agents, listed in the invaluable directory (25 euros,) were housed in their own floor with a check-in desk admitting only those with previous appointments.

Using our directory, we identified six agents under "literary historical fiction" to cover our targeted countries, and wrote them emails introducing ourselves.

Attaching a note on sitio tiempo press' executive letterhead to each bilingual translation, and inserting the book's postcard and silk bookmark emblazoned with the title, we left bundles for each agent at the appointment desk, for followup post-Buch Messe.

Personal Contacts
A section called the Center for Politics, Literature, and Translation attracted us with its juicy events: presentation of the Paul Celan prize, a Cuban hour with a PEN presence, where Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the legendary Green's leader, did NOT show up, while Amir Valles, Rugelio Saunders and Jorge Arzola did speak on the panel. Multilingual earphone provided access to the discourse in one's own language.

These events, often at the end of the day, usually concluded with drinks and hors d's. Here Inke and I met a publisher from Haiti, Willems Edouard of Editions Presses Nationals in Petionville. Kettly Mars, a Haitian novelist whose Saisons Sauvages was just released from Mercure to good reviews, is working on her fourth book. (http://repeatingislands.com/2010/03/19/new-book-kettly-mars’-saisons-sauvages/.)

When Willems told me he had published Russell Banks, I offered my card and paid attention. (www.pressesnationales-dhaiti.com)

His catalog features an impressive collection of intellectuals and writers, from the republication of Jacques Romains' oeuvres to poets, short story writers (Jean-Euphele Milce,) and novelists including Cleante Valcin's La Blanche Negresse and Cruelle Destinee, which advised the reader that this was a novel about an unfortunate prostitute.

If the protagonist is named Destiny in this novel of the l930's, I thought, then I have finally found an older woman named Destiny. A short survey of the plots of each of these republished novels led me to believe that Barbara Chase Riboud would be interested in Valcin's treating subjects similar to hers. The press on Kettly Mars' Saisons Sauvages about the Duvalier regime in Haiti deals with master/slave relations as well. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Chase-Riboud)

Many prizes are awarded for literature at the beginning of the fair, to take advantage of the attendant press. At the German Women in Publishing party, I met Ingeborg Hohl of LiBeraturpreis, which awards a prize for women writers from Third World countries. The winner of the German Book Prize this year went to Melinda Nadj Abonji for Falcons Without Falconers, a story of a Hungarian minority in Serbia. The novel, which begins with a child's point of view, continues in the adult woman's pov in an "apparently carefree Balkan comedy." One can't help but think of the beginning of Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated with a similarly picaresque beginning; both books conclude in the shadow of wars with genocide as theme. Undoubtedly we missed a lot, but it seemed strange that only one American author, Brett Easton Ellis, was included in major events and programming.

Jet Lag cum Geo-psychocultural Whiplash
I made sure that I flew from Frankfurt to Philadelphia, with a several day stop over in our home in the rural Penn-York Valley. True, I had major events scheduled for two of the three days there, but by the time I arrived back in Northen California, it took me a couple days to get over the worst effects of the jet lag.

I am developing a theory that the symptoms that possessed me--dizziness, fatigue--were really cultural whiplash masquerading as the need to meditate, perchance to dream. From Rebgeshain to Frankfurt, from Amsterdam's Dutch Resistance Museum, to Paris and rural Brittany, featuring the prized belon oysters and Neolithic tumulus, I was in the thrall of a challenge to my digestive system--psychic and cultural digestion--spending productive hours flat on my back sorting through impressions, not only filing them but connecting them with their corollary a-ha's.

Writers and Publishers Mix it Up in Europe: the first blog en route to the Frankfurt Book Fair

2010-09-28T14:51:00.000-07:00

In the month that I am here in Europe, between three countries--Holland, France and Germany--half is dedicated to research and to writing on my second novel in the Textile Trilogy, Linen Shroud. I follow Carole Maso's dictum that form should follow function, therefore silk is by definition sensuous and heady: in our country, a novel of ideas only rarely includes the erotic, but it's no surprise that my favorite writers combine intellect and sensuality: Durrell, Duras, Nin, Miller, Maso. Kundera.

Linen Shroud, by comparison with Burning Silk and their respective textiles, is tough, difficult to produce, flexible and enduring. The theme of Linen Shroud-- war--presents me with a particular challenge, as I am a lifelong antiwar protestors even while I acknowledge that WWII--my father a medic in Patton's Fourth Army--was necessary for the continuation of our western way-of-life.

The other half of my month, one might say, is dedicated to developing an audience both for my books and for the other books that we--the publishing collective that is sitio tiempo press--intend to publish.

So I am en train de traveling from Brittany, where I had the opportunity to put face and place--essential to a novelist--on the oystermen I had only read about in The Oysters of Locmariaquer. I am heading to Le Havre where I will be a presenter at a conference given by the University on The Woodstock Years, a fine bilingual audience for my books and our ideas I think. And after, I will be meeting a friend, Inke Schwab, who has the advantage of being trilingual, to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair.

I will be issuing reports on a daily basis from the Frankfurt Book Fair in my blog.

Purposes always overlap in my estimation. And so I began doing research years ago on selling foreign rights. A file disgorged an article I clipped from the NYT several years ago that followed Mizzi van der Pluijm of Contact Publishing in Amsterdam, around the floor of the Fair and to parties in the evening. This allowed me to google Mm. van der Pluijm, read her articles and appreciate how she analyzes the book market for foreign rights. How could I cold-call a possible publisher without doing at least this? I sent her my book Burning Silk, together with the bound bilingal booklet with the first chapter in French and English and a personal note on the press' executive stationery. I emailed her asking her to expect the same. I think I can't do more.

While in Amsterdam, I checked out the two bookstores in Spui (said Spow): the American Book Center and the Athenaeum. Of the two, I would have to say Athenaeum is the more literary and multicutltural, while ABC and its attendant performance/

meeting space The Treehouse, is largely for an English speaking audience. The buyer at Athenaeum, who will remain unnamed, implied that I was cracked to be going to Frankfurt without appointments. And, though I know this is how the Book Fair works, I have always had to see a product in production before I completely understand it.

Inke Schwab and I will attend instructive seminars in buying and selling foreign rights. With 20,000 people there, all agenda driven, we will be able to tease out (I hope) the players that we are interested in speaking with us. That's the plan.

While in Paris, I made a personal contact with the manager who books readings at Shakespeare & Co, as conversation we had begun months earlier towards understanding how to book a reading with Shakespearte & Co (Mondays only and months in advance.)

I contacted a writer of historical fiction that I have always wanted to meet. She is also a textile artist. We have communicated by email over time and yes, Barbara Chase- Riboud, author of the puissante Sally Hemmings and other poignant investigations into the lives of women at once powerless (Venus of Hottentot) and influential (Sally Hemmings.)

Turning the corner from my hotel, I ran into Gallimard's offices. I emailed a scout I met ten years ago while producing a limited edition book in France's book village Montolieu and asked him if he had a contact at Gallimard. He did and would not only give me the name of his close friend, the foreign rights acquisition editor, but also invited me to use his name.

Everything bodes well. Stay tuned if you are interested.

The Dutch Resistance Museum: an hour of powerful sentiments unrolls across days

2010-09-26T14:09:00.000-07:00

Luckily, a sign at the beginning of the museum explained something I would have had to deduce from the entire display: In 1941, the Dutch were divided about the German occupation, most complacent as the Germans made a great show of befriending the Dutch, "fellow Aryans." Nazi moves against the Jews were small and incremental. First registration, then a fence around the neighborhood, finally the yellow star and segregation, but all of it gradual, regrettable but not alarming. But when several hundred Jews were rounded up for deportation, the Dutch seemed to wake up, went out onto the street and mounted a general strike. Then, when the Germans brought violence against Dutch resistors, the population moved toward resistance very quickly. Actions accelerated. The Franks, Ann's family, went into hiding in 1942 for instance, where they remained for two years until they were betrayed.

In comparing the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC to the Dutch Resistance Museum, I have to say that the two museums are equally powerful in presenting the horror of the Holocaust, each using completely different methods.

The architecture of the Holocaust Museum reinforces the feeling of dehumanization, with railcars and barracks in the concentration camps reproduced effectively. A vast pile of shoes, men's, women's and children's in a jumble, made--as Peter Brook's theater troupe discovered as well--for a powerful nonverbal punch in the gut.

By contrast, the Resistance Museum, leads one through a broken-up kaleidescope of spaces, each refracting and opening into each other, leading one deeper into the story.

Scrolls of personal stories mounted outside the glass cases and projecting into the aisle, with large photo of each young person, told of individual acts of resistance by both Jew and Gentile. These men and women and their stories personified the kind of courage we must each doubt we possess unless we are tried. Many of these individuals paid for their heroism with their lives.

An illegal bank, an illegal forger of papers, an illegal printing press, illegal crystal radios, doors concealed behind bookshelves, men dressed as women with scarves wrapped around their adam's apple: these elaborate systems were put into place within a year, escalating in sophistication. These Dutch individuals, contemporaries of my parents, put together a system of resistance that took my breath away. Code numbers in letters as small as an ant printed painstakingly on a cigarette paper…so much at stake.

The main road where I walked from Waterloo Pelin to the museum, Plantage, holds a theater that was used as a detention and deportation center for Jews. On the other side of the street, we noticed a colorful day care center. The museum explained that this very day care center smuggled Jewish children out of Amsterdam. When a tram would pull up to the stop in front of the daycare center, the brave women would rush toward the tram with babies under each arm, or two children by the hand and leap on. Everyone on the tram would smile, while the Nazis on the other side of the
street were none the wiser. Six hundred children were saved this way.

The hardest part came at the end, not only the totting up of the sheer volume of Jews exterminated (photos remind you: men, women and flossy haired children, all clueless, faces all vaguely familiar, mishpookah) but also the terrible winter after France and Belgium were liberated, when the Dutch had no food at all. Twenty thousand people died of starvation. The houses in the Jewish quarter, later demolished for being unsalvageable after being empty for so long, were stripped for fuel. People boiled garbage for soup, gleaned every edible scrap, to survive that terrible winter, a despair much like the concentration camp survivors Elie Weisel described, forced by their captors to march through the winter snow, starving and inadequately clothed, as their liberators approached from the other direction.

Unlike the darkness of the Holocaust Museum (I was alive when this happened, a baby; my father, a medic with Patton's Army, never spoke of his experiences liberating concentration camps,) the Dutch Resistance Museum, released me with a glimmer. These people DID resist, like the Dane, like Jews in Warsaw. Photos showed not only survivors of the camps returning to sit on their streets, to begin the search for their loved ones, as well as the Dutch citizens greeting allied forces, the end of the nightmare.

A postscript surprised me. Apparently it wasn't until a neo nazi group arose in the 1960's, that members of the Dutch resistance began to tell their stories. It wasn't until the 1980's that the museum was organized to tell the story. Copies of two graphic novels illustrated by Heuve, the Tintin artist, tell the story both from the pov of a Jewish family and their good friends and neighbors, ordinary people drawn into becoming Dutch resistors.

This reminded me of the fact that survivors of the Irish Potato Famine didn't tell their children the story of what had happened, out of shame perhaps that such a terrible thing had visited them. It wasn't until nearly a century later that the Irish came to own their history of abuse by the British which deepened the deadly outcome of the potato famine.

Three million dead and one million and a half forcibly shipped off on death ships to other continents, if I remember my numbers correctly.

De Kat, the Cat: the windmill that produces colors

2010-09-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

Wednesday was going to be a sunny day, the weather projections forecasted, and so we planned our trip to Zaanse Schwanz [sic]for that day. There, the brochure promised, we would find a village which had been an industrial center with over 1000 windmills. Nine were left. One of them, Der Kat, The Cat, still ground rock and wood, bark and roots for dyes and pigments. Is your heart racing? Then you will want to come along with us.

The banks of the river, lined with the nine windmills, evoked something between a possible history--travels along one's DNA I call it--and a Miyazaki film, for where else would you find the stirring spectacle of working windmills?

To our regret, the mustard windmill was closed for repairs but we had out sights set on De Kat. Our host Todd told us that, when it is windy--they went in February--so much power is freighted, the windmill is almost frightening. Indeed we found choppers, pounders and grinders all on the main floor, whose levers clearly generated a great deal of force when operative.

Display cases--all of this set into the larger wooden structure--gave us a tour of their products, as well as a history. When tiles were ground, a red dye was generated which was used to color the canvas windmill sails with their "summer" colors. Nearby a windmill was dressed in its winter sails, a dark rich brown, perhaps burnt umber. Not surprisingly, De Kat produces fresh sails for other windmills.

The second floor was a marvel of gears, all of them at a distance from each other today, but clearly movable, to connect together to create motion in several directions. Yes, it is true: the miller is the only one permitted to run the windmill.

De Kat's miller has worked five days a week for the past forty years. When I asked naively if there was going to be a demonstration, the step-in miller pointed out the obvious with a smile. No wind, no work.

The top floor, with a small galley around the workings, let out in three directions to a outside porch. Even with a desultory wind turning the sails, anyone standing on the far side would be decapitated. The downward rush of a blade casts a large shadow with a whoosh. An interval of sunlight and then the downward blade was forecast by shadow and sound.

The gift shop offered little bottles of pigment labeled "artificial" The display cases outside had a small sign saying that anyone interested in the pigments ground on site could ask at the desk. Within minutes of asking, we were conducted into the inner sanctum marked private. Here, in a pleasant room about the size of Rembrandt's etching studio, a central table stood for workshops and negotiations, packages of both pigments and dyes stacked neatly along the walls, glass
vials affixed to each showing the color of the actual powder. Hanks of wool, silk, linen and cotton hung from the ceiling demonstrating the color each dye would produce.

Workshops are held regularly at De Kat. Paint samples drying on plywood were the products of students from the art department at a nearby university.

I bought several kinds of umber produced at De Kat for my friend, the painter Mollie Favour, and a small glass grinder for making the powder into pigment by mixing it with linseed oil. (I'm sure this instrument has a name.) I also bought indigo and sandalwood for my friend Judith Thomas and I. Wode, which I would also like to explore was too expensive to buy without immediate plans to use it. Cochineal which comes not only from Mexico, but also from Spain, seemed frivolous as I plan to go with Judith to Eric Mindling's dyeing tour in the Oaxaca Highlands where they raise cochineal.

The Turkish Hamman

2010-09-19T13:43:00.000-07:00

We were greeted by a beautiful friendly woman in a flowered headscarf and taken through our options. She and I each spoke a little French and so we communicated this way. We chose a program from the middle of the menu: 40 euros, plus towel and robe (6,) and a scrubby glove we would need (6.)

"You have slips?" she asked us. On the phone, no one had said we needed slips or we would have brought them.

"N'importe pas," she assured us.

Nonetheless, this language issue gave us a lot of laughs. We arrived stripped down in a central room where a zaftig bathlady waited: everyone else had on underpants, the "slips" we could easily have kept on. She scrubbed us all over with our glove with a piney smelling soap and showed us into a steam room.

Two young women who had just gotten their Bac degree were celebrating a day off from the preschool where they taught. They told us about a Dutch politician who showed up at the protest in NY at Ground Zero against the mosque. He insulted Muslim women by not only asking why they had to wear scarves but referring to headscarves as 'dirty rags," which seemed to all four of us not only as racism but also highly sexist with its veiled allusion to menstruation and to scrubwomen. Do you have to be a woman to feel the sexism in that racist slur?

I had to rinse the caustic piney soap off early as it wasn't agreeing with my skin. After coming out of the steam, we were shown into a room with marble slab tables where we each received a vigorous if superficial massage with oil-infused hot water. After we showered, we were each given a dish of mud to slather on our bodies. Another room with benches and buckets allowed us to spend time attending carefully to our hair, feet and nails. We imagined that, with someone at home watching the kids, a woman might spend hours on a Sunday at the hammam--why not?

After, feeling tight and toned, we retired in our robes to the salon near the door where cushioned couches were ringed with large hammered trays on stands as coffee tables.

A group of Muslim women were enjoying animated conversation with each other and the attendants at the end of the day. How beautiful they were! We remembered that Ramadan was coming to an end with the full moon (or perhaps earlier.) We ordered a pot of strong mint tea and a small plate of sweets: baklava, carmelized sugar and nuts, almond and nougat based pastries--tiny tastes that we shared--rolled into crescents (10 euros.)

In the dressing room, a young women coated her entire body in a white creamy paste. What is it? I asked. A masque, she answered and took herself off to wait the required number of minutes while the masque dried.

I slept twelve hours after dinner and the hammam.

Yom Kippur, Day of Atonement

2010-09-18T13:41:00.000-07:00

This was a difficult day I am not going to write about. Into every holiday, a little rain must fall: a failed fast, a silenced bell tower, a closed Portuguese synagogue, time in pharmacies, aching feet…..

Museum Canal Boat

2010-09-17T14:56:00.000-07:00

Today we took a canal boat to three museums, a lovely way to view the city. A ticket allows you to get on and off at any of a dozen stops on the loop.

The tour of Ann Frank House is structured much like the Rembrandt House in that a modern building alongside connects to the actual house and warehouse where Otto Frank ran his pectin business and the family went into hiding.

As we went up the staircase to the actual house, I felt like I was going up to my grandmother's which was also above retail/commercial. Both Judy and I admitted that when we were young, the Holocaust seemed like ancient history while, as we have aged, the events have telescoped in, so that--by now--they seem appallingly close…which they are.

Otto Frank, the only member of the family who survived, said that Ann's early diaries were much like any girl's, full of boys and giggling confidences. But after they went into hiding in the Annex, where they lived for two years, the diaries became very deep, as anyone who has read them knows. He said he had no idea that his daughter had such profound thoughts and emotions. He drew the conclusion that parents never really know their children's innermost thoughts.

Ann decorated her room with cutouts from magazines. A photo of Scarlett O'Hara and another of a dark haired actress playing piano allowed me to imagine that Ann had pictured herself as a grownup adult through such images. She tells her diary (Dear Kitty) that she planned to become a famous writer. Since she died only two weeks before liberation, and before, while they were in the Annex, official word had gone out that collections and memoirs were being avidly sought for publication. In the annex, she began the novel that she planned to write based on her diaries which she called, The Annex.

When that light was snuffed out, it lit up the world.

Although my father was a medic with Patton Army, and helped liberate the concentration camps, he never once mentioned it. I have often reflected that his world view--he was strict father and a powerfully disciplined researcher in Archives his field of neurosurgery--must have been shaped by that experience. He said more than once that--while he loved individual humans--he had a profound contempt for humanity.

To my surprise, the Rijkesmuseum has only three Vermeers. Of course there are only a couple dozen in the world.
Still…

Van Gogh Museum (and I have seen a comprehensive Van Gogh show earlier) revealed a young insecure artist who spent so much of his life as an artist copying the styles that blazed through "his set" like pointillism and Japanese prints; he also copied actual works by earlier artists. Everyone learns their own way; this way--copying, trying what others are doing--is timehonored. He was a fortunate artist in the support his brother Theo gave him to the end. I am not a Van Gogh scholar and yet it seemed to me that it was only after Arles, when he was institutionalized, that his voice came through in the boldstrokes we have come to associate with Van Gogh at his best: crows and wheatfield, starry night, olive grove.

At the end of the day, exhausted, we went to the extraordinary art deco Tuchinsky [sic] Theater to see the film, The American, which seems to be occasioning conversations in Amsterdam from the newspaper and bookstore windows. For me, it was a reprise of Up In the Air, with George Clooney stuck in a meaningless life, finding and then losing love. In a memorable sequence, the observant village priest accuses Clooney's character, and all Americans, of not knowing history. And here I thought that was a human trait.

Lost in Amsterdam

2010-09-16T14:32:00.000-07:00

My friend Judy from Findley Lake, our family’s home, arrived around noon and wanted to head right out. Directional coordinates are difficult in a semicircular city where street names change often. And so we promptly got lost which– as every intrepid traveler knows–is (within limits) the best way to discover a city.

Around the corner, we spotted an unusual quilted down garment in the window of a store Riele. Within minutes, the shopgirl was showing us how chic Amsterdammers keep warm (for it is autumn here.) A khaki colored oiled/waxed linen kilt with a big belt and buckle at the hips captivated me. (If only I were 30 pounds thinner.)

The “thing” that drew us into the shop pulled over the head and covered shoulders to below the breasts with a folded neck that could be pulled up to the ears. A down skirt, with curving quilt lines, had an attached knit top that allowed you to place the skirt anywhere on your trunk. (For those who don’t know, I had a down company with two design partners in Aspen in the mid-70!s and thus am alert to any innovations in down design.)

We had a map, Judy and I, but the six-point type naming the streets and canals presented a challenge to our middle-aged eyes. As it worked out, we spent our time in the old original city, much of it highly commercialized.

Nonetheless, we wandered along the Singelgracht Canal lined with the tulip mart. We stumbled into Spui (said Spow,) a square, lined with hip boutiques, and found the American Book Center and its attendant literary center The Treehouse.

I had communicated earlier with their director Donna DuCarme who said that she was planning very little for September and besides, getting people to come to a reading would be an issue. We just missed their show on erotica, which would have been interesting to see in a city so uninhibited about sexual identity.

Nieuwemarkt, Amsterdam

2010-09-15T14:20:00.000-07:00

Todd and Barbara’s canal house has a footprint of approximately 16 feet square. Land is at a premium in Amsterdam; houses were taxed on their footprint so thrifty Amsterdammers built up. My room is under the roof beams, up a steep ladder to the most spacious room in the house.

After a pancake breakfast, I venture out onto the street. Todd accompanies me to the corner.

“This way”–he points left to a canal–”is the red light district and this way”–he points toward the church whose belltower will either tell me the time by looking out my window or by ears, as it rings out the hours–”that way are the markets and the Metro.”

I head down our alley toward the church and–after peering both ways– take a left toward the shop that says “Tweewiilers,” a bike rental shop. After a moment gauging the traffic patterns–bikes and pedestrians throng the narrow street lined on both sides with small retail shops–I head out.

Here, in a crosspattern that characterizes the core of the onion bulb, radiating in a semicircle from the Central Station where all transportation sources both to the North Sea and to the city itself, I find the pattern:

One or two blocks, then a canal crosses–lined on both sides with trees and broad pavement to accommodate bikes, pedestrians and the occasional car–then another block or two before another canal crosses. The street I am on changes its name every time a canal crosses!

Todd has pointed out to me a salient fact I would have missed. Each canal house leans out slightly and each has a grappling hook on the top story, where the roofbeam meets the top story. Thus heavy furniture is hoisted up to the floor where it will reside, be it piano or mattress, without the danger of banging out windows on the stories below.

Terrified of getting lost in this maze, I find a coffee shop, having found out from my Lonely Planets guide book that this is how one identifies the places that sell cannabis, and entering, ask for their menu of hashish. After careful consideration, I choose the blond from Morocco, temporarily rejecting the more resinous, therefore darker, varieties from the Himalayas and Lebanon.

I take a place up front by the window and potted palms–it is morning after all–and breaking off a small piece, light up. Here I can smoke hash in the way I prefer, working up a great cloud of smoke to get a good spark going, then inhaling part, blowing it out through my nose. (I prefer not to go into paroxysms of coughing.)

Hashish has become so rare in the United States that my fellow smokers look at me in amazement when I exercise even a portion of this wasteful routine.

I am curious: hash–rare though it is–has always been my preferred smoke, delivering a clearheaded high with a fine light-touch energy. Will it be the same now that I have reached elder status? It is.

I buy the pipe, pocket the glassine envelope of hash and go out into the street. If all of Amsterdam is like this, I think to myself, one could live here forever.

I retrace my steps so that I am sure I can find my way home, then carefully venture out several blocks in the opposite direction, quickly coming into a more modern street with larger canal crossings. The cafes are full at lunchtime. I find the Rembrandt house and enter it.

I choose a small phonelike translator for English and proceed to the first room. This entryroom is covered with paintings both those of clients of Rembrandt’s–he was an artdealer as well as a painter–and his own. and a large chest that belonged to his mistress Hendrickhe Stouffels who moved in as his common law wife after his first wife Saskia died. The chest was used to store all of her wealth: silverware, gold boullion, rare silks and precious linens.

The next small room didn’t even merit an audio explanation and yet was of high interest to me. It contained a screw type press, with lines strung across the top for Rembrandt’s etching to dry after coming out of the press. (I would see a film demonstrating the etching process in the studio on the top floor.)

Along the far wall, all the instruments of etching lay out for display or use.

The kitchen spoke to me the most, as I always glean so much information from a historic kitchen for my books. First of all, this room was one of several I was to find containing a cupboard bed!

Readers of my first novel Burning Silk will recall the cupboard bed that Catherine and her husband shared, where she gave birth to their first child. Years after, I had visited Huguenot Street in New Paaltz NY. Entering the first house, I saw a cupboard knob in the paneling of the wall. Expectant, feeling time collapsing on all sides of me, I pulled the knob to find my first cupboard bed in person.

Back in Amsterdam, the audio explained that these short cupboard beds in Rembrandt’s house were not only because of the short stature of more ancient peoples but also because a health belief they held had them sleep sitting up, propped by pillows.

The hearth contained a tile stove, about which my mother had always raved for their radiant heat, and an open fireplace, flanked by a box of wood and a copper pot full of peat bricks.

The footprint of the house was grand compared to the average canal house, for Rembrandt was successful in his time unlike his countrymen Vermeer and Van Gogh.

Frankfurt to Amsterdam

2010-09-14T14:45:00.000-07:00

I begin to suspect the train has crossed the border from Germany to Holland by the resemblance to landscapes and homes found in Flemish art: the pitch of the roofs; dirt road through an esplanade of poplars.

I knew that we would transition from my starting point in Frankfurt to the lowlands, although I do not know precisely when we arrived: was it the modern windmills dotted through the landscape, one per hectare; was it the throngs of bicycles at every RR crossing? Lots of z’s in the placenames? Double aa’s and plenty of j’s. Yes, we have arrived in Holland.

Clues keep racing by the window in our bullet train: the scale of the buildings: low and small, with economy. Neighborhoods and villages with a different look than Germany or France, in a language I do not understand yet: roof pitch and building materials.

Cows along rivers that meander across broad expanses of fields. What is that little decorative touch above windows called? The Dutch make the most of it. Around me, women who look like Debra Kinal: regal with voluptuous lips, blond hair and milk-and-roses skin.

Canals! Silver birch. Roofs that wrap around two sides of a house. Greenhouses. Heather wild and in bloom everywhere. Stand of a tall wildflower that look like small ladyslippers, several on a stem. Graffiti on every small public utility/structure. Bike paths well paved, going from village to village parallel to the train tracks.

Gardens/playgrounds glimpsed. Like Adventure Playground in Berkeley, structures that also serve to grow things on. Ducks. Fragmides, same exotics invasives as ours.

Knotweed, that invasive quasi-bamboo. Flocks of waterbirds. Clipped thatched roofs. I haven’t seen any storks yet; I hope I will.

Utrecht and the classic canal boats, wide and low to the canal water, a deck surface that looks like it’s oiled canvas and stretched across the top ribs of the boat, just like the old masters’ painted them, shining with rain.

Next stop: Amsterdam.

David v. Goliath, lit small press v. publishing behemoth: will it work?

2010-06-23T15:03:00.000-07:00

Hello editors,

I am an Erie PA native, living parttime in Berkeley CA and parttime in Western NYS--Chautauqua County and in the Penn-York Valley south oMy first novel in the Textile Trilogy was just released a month ago from sitio tiempo press, an imprint of Reinhabitory Institute.

What?! you might say if you are paying attention.

Reinhabitory Institute was founded to bring the principles and practices of the love and care of your home watershed into every neighborhood, school and home in the United States--and beyond.

What makes the first novel published by sitio tiempo "reinhabitory" is the subject of a blog on my website and without a doubt, for the editor with a nose for news, The Story: http://www.destinykinal.com/cms/blog/index/blogbyid/blog_id/105

Yes there's much more to the story than woman-who-grew-up-in-Erie-publishes-novel-to-critical-acclaim...though I'd be happy with that story...as would you. I'm told I do a terrific interview and yes, I would be delighted to come into the studio for a live interview.

The other terrific story is this one: traditional publishing is crumbling (5 giants owns all the trade publishing houses now, all focused on the bottom line.) Does it make for a good read, great literature? The clarion call has been sounded and scores of new paradigms in publishing are out of the gate. Without a doubt, the internet is making it a whole new game: book tours, book reviews, conversations about books--all are happening on line.

Our virtual book club will go up within the month as friends and fan read and want to discuss Burning Silk.

I once was a maven in the world of targeted marketing (I introduced the Fortune 500 consumer goods companies to segmentation by values and lifestyles (VALS), demographics and product usage--all mixed up in a lethal cocktail, back in the day.) i have never liked mass marketing. Target audiences for this book include French Huguenots, textile artists, American history buffs, native Americans, the GLBT community...and none of them have anything in common with
each other except that they will all enjoy this book.

Book sales, so far as we are concerned, is back to the personal network--mostly online.

The personal relationship between writer and reader is being restored by a most unlikely medium: the computer.

Question is: will it work? Will David be able to tilt with Goliath?

Another question: what will happen to bookstores?

Another question: what will happen to books?

Our strategy for this book on the ground is simple: reading, creating a stir (if possible) where I/the author has lived and has family and friends.

So from central NY/PA to western NY/PA, I will work my networks like I am doing now, supported by the staff at sitio tiempo press back in Berkeley.

After that, I will be reading around the SF Bay Area, then back to New England. Finally, in December, I will be down in south Florida. With my personal networks exhausted, and my online community expanding, we shall see if "the book has legs." And that will be the proof of the pudding for one small literary press. With our technique sharpened, we will introduce our next book--poet Jerry Martien's The Authentic Life, another look at the iconic Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County Wars, presaging what is happening on our borderlands today. Yes another reinhabitory novel (with a lesson for us to examine encapsulated in it) from sitio tiempo press.

Am I embarrassed by the sex scenes I have written?

2010-06-23T14:42:00.000-07:00

A good friend and writer who will remain unnamed commented on the steamy sex in Burning Silk.
"I have been reading your book. I am a bit embarrassed by the sex scenes between the two women. Does anyone else feel that way? However, the very good writing helps one to feel that the writer knows what she is doing!"

My response: "Truth?--I feel a bit more than embarrassed about the sex scenes between the two women. I consider it an act of negative capability (or whatever we call that thing Keats described) that I not only achieved it--you should read my essay on how I did it from the Taos residency which I will post here up on my blog. Not only that I wrote it but that I had the guts to publish it. I stand behind it, discomfort and all. My question to my friend: did the hetero sex scenes embarrass you as well?"

Here follows the essay I wrote at a residency in Taos NM about writing Burning Silk and how I came to include the detailed erotic scenes that will always characterize the book...and make it controversial..

The Metises: designer people engineered by the continent

2010-06-23T13:53:00.000-07:00

In fact, I STILL didn't know what my novel was about, after completing it in Taos NM at the end of 2005, dazzled by the compelling eroticism.

The journal I kept named the tribes I passed through, Hopi, Navajo, and the drama of the season of rituals of the Pueblo people.

Burning Silk is a contact story: French Huguenot silkmakers come to depend on their metises neighbors for the success of their venture.

Who are the metises? They are modelled on the Revolutionary War Original people of the Susquehanna River where I have had a home for 25 years. Queen Esther Montour was Dutch/French/Mohawk/Lenape. A sophisticated woman from
a line of women who made it into the white man's history books, Queen Esther and her sister Queen Catherine spoke several European and several native languages. The metises people, I have come to see, were this continent's attempt to produce a hybrid people who could live in harmony on this continent.

It served the new breed of English settlers coming up the Susquehanna to style Queen Esther and her band as "savages," in order to justify taking their land. Queen Esther and her band were driven from their homes at harvest time, their log houses burned, their orchards cut down, their crops destroyed, men, women and children fleeing north across the border
into Canada.

[Footnote: Yes I have read every account of the Wyoming massacre that has been published, that is, white man's history. New settlers killed Queen Esther's young son as he was travelling along the river. She went mad. What happened after that, no one knows but several white men were ritually executed by angry native people, among them a raging woman
identified as Queen Esther.]

Here is how I describe them in Burning Silk:

She had also not anticipated the impact their neighbors’ way of life would have on her family. None of the Duladiers had met an indigenous American before coming to this continent. To find a new race of people—the métis—sprung up here over the past two hundred years astonished them. The magnitude of this fact seemed like something they might have heard about before arriving.

Their neighbors, the Montour family, on whom they had come to depend for knowledge of this new land and its particulars, lived in homes with windows like theirs, of log and plaster and fieldstone, clothed themselves in a pastiche of European and deerskin clothing, furnished their homes in a stunning mélange of Louis Quatorze, Regency, and . . .

Bedouine, chic beyond any European woman’s dreams (if she had the eyes to see it, and the Duladier women did), as louche a chic as they had ever imagined. No doubt certain travelling Parisians found this rangy frontier style shocking Archives enough to take home and adapt to their own Bohemian lifestyles.

And the British? Little wonder that Marguerite’s grandmother was said to have run a salon on the distant Susquehanna that no European taking a tour of the Americas would have missed.

Sometimes, like catching a glimpse of herself in a window, and seeing herself as an outsider might, she understood how the Montours must see members of her own family: jarring and unnatural. Not belonging. Out of place. Their pale skin, coiffed hair, cinched waists, frock coats . . . all more than a bit stifling. The Montours were a fresh wind blowing, levelling pretense and piety. Not everyone in her family agreed with Catherine’s assessment, however.

La Madonne, source of all our success, we need the Montours. Need Regina. Why else would you send them to us?

She comforted herself the way a motherless child will: Soit tran- quille, my child. Breathe. Let your shoulders drop. Relax your jaw. There.

She lifted the cover of a small jewelry box her father Auguste had commissioned for her when she went through her first full volte with her mother, as apprentice. I must think of a gift to mark their first apprenticeships, she pondered, thinking of both Kristiana and Regina.

Tipping a velvet bag into her palm, she pulled out a snood set with seed pearls for her hair. Peering into the oval metallic mirror mounted near the window, and tucking the netted pearls around the contours of her braid, she felt her small rebellious spirit kindle in the act of adorning her corona. Too dressy for such a day, someone might say. Perhaps my conservative sister? At this late hour of her confinement, anything could be countenanced if it made her feel better. If Regina thinks it beautiful . . . Then she closed the lid of her treasure box, sealed the cupboard doors to her bed, and headed out to the day, to taste its flavor."

I cherish the possibility that we may still allow this continent to shape a new people, one who can live in harmony with each other on our home watersheds, this continent which we have so disrupted, this continent where we imported the worst of our European ways and now are exporting under the name of "globalization," a disease that feeds on authentic indigenous cultures, destroying them and supplanting the Golden Arches.

Matrilineality and honoring our foremothers

2010-06-22T14:24:00.000-07:00

Today I had an extraordinary encounter with a foremother, an ancestor who stood firm in her vision during the years when deals were being struck and friendships betrayed.

I was first attracted by Sally Roesch Wagner's book Sisters in Spirit that documents how the Iroquois clanmothers made a terrific impact with their matrilineal way of life on our feminist foremothers from European stock. Her findings allowed my characters to move forward with what seemed the obvious outcome of their contact with each other: a high regard for the matrilineal way of life.

Sally's work must be acknowledged for her contribution to my thinking, in my next novel Linen Shroud, book two of the Textile Trilogy (where the impact of her research comes into play more,) here, on my website, and in all arenas where I present matrilineality as a possible return to an earlier way of life that may have been widespread on many continents and in many cultures, if the archaeological evidence is to be credited.

Sally was given the gift of directing the Matilda Jocelyn Gage Foundation, to re-introduce a woman who held the line for women's rights so consistently throughout her visionary life, seeing women's rights as a cornerstone which could hold a whole house aloft, a house that connects religious freedom, our ability of imagine a parallel world (she was the mother in law and muse of Frank Baum, creator of the Oz world,) the slavery that all of us are afflicted with even today (she was the first to refer to sex trafficking e.g.,) the influence of the Haudenausanee--paradigm in our time of a matrilineal culture that has held its identity continuously--and reproductive rights.

Who has heard her name? When Anthony and Stanton struck a deal with the Women's Christian Temperance Union, narrowing the focus on getting the vote, and away from women's rights, Matilda Jocelyn Gage was struck from the historical record of feminism. The break came on the issue of religious freedom. Today we are in the grip of the tyranny of religious fundamentalism.

A new lightning rod, a mecca for women's rights is springing up--not in Seneca Falls--but in Fayetteville, adjacent to the Onondaga and the Erie Canal.

Interview with Jason Wright publisher of Oddball Magazine

2010-06-09T14:36:00.000-07:00

I'm attending a week's certification course in Literary Small Press Publishing at Emerson College in Boston MA with a dozen other small press entrepreneurs.

Yesterday, Jason Wright of Oddball Magazine interviewed me about my recently released book Burning Silk, doing it on his phone and then adding commentary (like this) on his blog. www.oddballmagazine.com (I think.) So today I interviewed Jason and am learning how to post this interview on my blog, schooled by my mates who are blog savvy.

(Video interview forthcoming.)
I also did a second interview with Margery Hannah who is working on a novel. Stay tuned for that interview.

Settle in and hear about Jason and his rapprochement with bipolar disease. His commitment to Oddball Magazine. And his strangely but pleasingly unshielded personality.

Green Jobs and the Edible Schoolyard

2010-05-05T15:09:00.000-07:00

In response to the article in the April 28 issue of East Bay Express airing the controversy about the value of Alice Waters inspired Edible Schoolyard at King Middle School, Caitlan Flanagan writing in The Atlantic misses the essential point. Children whose families raise food in their backyards are privileged children, regardless of whether their parents also send them to exclusive summer camps and travel abroad. Even Luke Tsoi, author of the article, brings his cultural baggage, opining that “the truth of the matter is that California is in crisis right now with its failure to equip so many of its students with the basic skills that they’ll need to go on to college and become successful.” Our failure as a society is this, to offer ourselves and our children one measure of privilege, one measure of success.

My experience working with at-risk kids on the Susquehanna watershed replicates what Eichorn reports in the Edible Garden. Unsurprisingly, restoration work on one’s own watershed and/or tapping into our ancient agricultural heritage in a harmonious way—seed, water, harvest, prepare and share—restores the child. And restores the human. This unrelenting focus on standardized testing to the exclusion of pursuits that make us more human are shortsighted. But then shortsightedness is perhaps the most descriptive quality of human development at this time, the one that is driving our species and other species and the planet MAD: mutually assured destruction.

Green jobs, now in its infant stage, will be the harbinger of a future that is sustainable. What a pity that Recovery dollars have focused on shovel-ready highway jobs rather than (for example) restoring the estimated 25,000 miles of West Virginia streams that have been despoiled by mountaintop removal of coal. The brief respite we and our pollinators experienced last year with State Departments of Transportations’ frugality will surely see a summer of blasted median strips, as the chemical companies restock DOT supplies for poisoning our wild verges and streams.

I still believe that Green Jobs is on Obama’s checklist and that he will get back to a National Service Program for our young people. In the meantime, Edible Schoolyard isn’t a program, it’s a movement. It can’t be stopped by the shortsighted.

Sincerely,

Destiny Kinal

Publisher, sitio/tiempopress

What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?

2010-04-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

In case you wondered...
What makes Burning Silk a Reinhabitory Novel?

I had been waiting for someone to ask the question. David Simpson did.

What makes Burning Silk a reinhabitory novel and further, what makes the book ideal to introduce sitio/tiempo press? The first book should set a bar.

True, Burning Silk is fiction, while most of our writings have been poetry and nonfiction. And it features a female protagonist and a strong sensory coda. And yet Burning Silk, the first in the Textile Trilogy, is a reinhabitory novel through and through.

Adaptation to the watershed

In the voice of a member of the silkmakers’ family, the book quotes Zenuemon of Japan as their guide: “Quality of silkseed and filament can only be improved by gradually adapting a strain of moth to regional climactic and geographic conditions.” The story documents a rare instance in the history of raising silk, of moving a domesticated silkmoth to a different continent, to acclimate to a different and unique home watershed. The Duladiers, a French Huguenot silkmaking family, collaborate with their native American neighbors on the Delaware watershed to find a native silkmoth to mate successfully with their domesticated one, a risky venture that could accelerate acclimatization.

Assimilation and differing ways-of-life

This not-very-subtle metaphor is echoed between the native and European families, who also have a metis child incubating in the womb by the end of thebook. And in a syndrome that has historically plagued metis communities, problems arise between the cultures. In the second book in the Textile Trilogy, Linen Shroud, conflict also arises between the Iroquois warrior societies and Quaker pacifists regarding participation in the American Civil War. And there’s a third element: the women of the silk worship a female deity, The Black Madonna, who--cruel when necessary--abhors war.

All of these conflicts are strongly reinhabitory, as we witness the differences in ways-of-life tear apart this family who has intermarried...and witness the victory of the industrial revolution over the traditional guild way of life

The third novel, Oil and Water, set on the early oil fields in NY/PA, dramatizes the triumph of the Petroleum Age over arts-and-crafts sensibilities as oil becomes the prevailing definition of modernity.

Part of the historical analysis we are calling reinhabitory involves seeing how these conflicts and struggles have formed the legacy we have inherited.

Matrilineality: agricultural societies

The proximity of matrilineal native neighbors–where everything, clan, property, land, name, comes through the maternal Archives line —lead European women directly on the path to Seneca Falls seeking similar rights and status. This buried history is
a deep reinhabitory issue which has received no attention anywhere that I can find, a task to which reinabitory fiction is well suited.

Reinhabitory fiction

My idea of reinhabitory fiction draws heavily on Milan Kundera's notion that the role of history in the novel is to reinhabit those critical crossroads in history where we buried certain values "in that vast cemetery of forgetting," and walked on with others. This definition is still a rough draft but it moved Jerry Martien to say he had a novel which he also felt was reinhabitory fiction. He describes it as a land use story.

“It re-tells the events of the Lincoln County War, takes it back to Billy the Kid’s origins in the myth of Pan, the old nature god, and forward to the assassination of his killer and biographer Pat Garrett in 1908. The story is documented by an El Paso reporter who’s a recovering war correspondent wounded in the Philippines, our first foreign adventurer in empire. It’s all the same war, re-enacts the same question, whether the land belongs to us or we belong to the land.”

We hope to raise $50,000 in the next six months, so that we can publish The Authentic Life in the manner it describes and move forward with other books waiting in the pipeline.

The Future

We plan to publish other creative reinhabitory works, such as plays that have been produced over the last three decades to enthusiastic audiences, and both children’s and young adult books.

We have extensive group experience in letterpress printing, access to print studio, and some extraordinary poets who would love to have limited edition printing of their work.

Art, music, architecture: it’s time to expand the range of bioregional thinking and practice. If the First Wave was defining bioregionalism, and the Second Wave was tying together the groups who grasped the concept immediately and imported it to their home watershed, may the Third Wave be marked by the imprint of sitio/tiempo press.